AT&T Has Differing Coverage Areas For Pre-Paid vs. Contract Customers?

On a recent trip to Central Oregon and specifically Bend, Oregon, I was perplexed as to why my Nokia E71 would not come out of ‘Offline’ mode. Thinking it was an issue with the phone or my account, I looked into when I returned home.

After looking at the coverage map for the Bend area (a metropolitan area of about 150,000 people in the central part of the state), I did see that Bend is in the covered area for AT&T service, as seen in the screenshot below.

However, I noticed the link above this map that says “GoPhone” and clicked it. I’m a pre-paid AT&T customer, meaning I use the “Pick Your Plan” option to avoid a yearly service agreement. Clicking the GoPhone gave me this map, which doesn’t include the Bend area.

Why would AT&T do this to their pre-paid customers? I imagine at least some pre-paid customers are those who are trying out AT&T to see if they like the service. If the coverage areas are separate and not as broad, AT&T may lose out on some customers who don’t like to be treated indifferently.

So why the difference in coverage areas? My guess is that AT&T doesn’t have towers of their own in the region specified above and are using a peer carrier to make calls. Using a peer carrier costs AT&T by the minute and I imagine they don’t make a good profit margin on service in these areas, making it illogical to give pre-paid customers coverage in these geographic areas.

One note – I’ve used T-Mobile pre-paid before, and T-Mobile doesn’t treat their pre-paid customers any differently with respect to coverage areas. T-Mobile pre-payers have access to the entire T-Mobile network without restriction.

6 comments on “AT&T Has Differing Coverage Areas For Pre-Paid vs. Contract Customers?
  1. My guess is this has more to do with the cell phones themselves, and the towers, than any nefarious plan from AT&T.

    AT&T is a GSM carrier, and GSM (voice) can operate on 4 different bands: 850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz, and 1900MHz.

    A few years ago, when AT&T was Cingular (actually, I think it was even earlier, when they were still the pre-Cingular AT&T), they made a big deal about how they were “improving their coverage”. They did this, not by building more towers, but by adding 850MHz radios to the existing towers. 850MHz has a longer wavelength, and is less succeptible to being blocked by things like trees, buildings, etc. than the higher frequencies. So this did, in fact, improve their coverage.

    But it was a big pain for people who had older phones that weren’t able to operate on the 850MHz band. These people had to either suffer with really crappy coverage (the towers had been built with spacing for the longer wavelength frequencies, but were running on the shorter wavelength frequencies, which made swiss cheese of their coverage), or pay to switch/upgrade to an 850MHz-capable quad-band or tri-band phone.

    So in this case of the pre-paid phones having different coverage, my guess would be that there’s one or more missing frequency bands on the phones, and not every tower has radios that work on every band.

    I’m actually kind of impressed that their online coverage map actually shows this discrepancy. That shows they at least know it’s going on. I’d have expected them to just show the same coverage, and shrug their shoulders when people with pre-paid phones complained about lack of coverage.

    Just my $0.02. 🙂

  2. Hey Josh – the E71 is a quadband phone so I don’t think it’s because of a missing frequency.

    It is good that they’re showing it, you’re right.

  3. Pingback: T-Mobile vs. AT&T, a Pre-Paid Mobile Smackdown! « Techcraver.com | Craving tech, craving life!

  4. I don’t believe its the phone. My husband and my daughter have the exact same phone, only my husband is on a at&t contract and my daughter is on a pay as you go phone. My daughters phone shows full bars but no service, yet my husband gets full bars and service, here at our house which is in a rural area. So I do believe the owner of a go phone is not able to roam.

  5. Are you sure? T-Mobile has a link on their coverage map for prepaid customers also making me think their must be a difference in coverage. I’m trying to decide between at&t and tmobile prepaid…

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